1. Field of the Invention
This application is directed to a system for the management of peripheral devices and more particularly to a system for monitoring and controlling the use of printers and multifunctional printing devices (MFP) distributed throughout a computer network.
2. Background
Currently, there are deployed enterprise computer systems that include as many as tens of thousands of users, deployed in thousands of locations and having at the user's disposal, tens of thousands of peripheral devices. The peripheral devices deployed in these computer systems are generally of variety of manufacture and have a variety of functional capabilities. Many of the devices are multifunctional printing devices (MFP) capable of printing, scanning, copying and facsimile, and capable of operating with a wide variety of selectable services, i.e. color printing, mono printing, variable resolution etc.
The cost to an enterprise for supporting a large number of peripheral devices is significant in terms of paper usage, toner usage and maintenance of the devices. Consequently, there is a need to both monitor and control the use of such peripheral devices in order to ensure that the use of the devices is authorized and justified.
One approach for controlling the costs associated with the use of peripheral devices is to monitor the use of the peripheral devises on a per user basis and/or restrict access to specified peripheral devices and/or device services on a per user basis. However, in the state of the art, such systems that provide for system-wide monitoring and controlling the use of a large number of peripheral devices on a per user basis are typically limited to the peripheral devices of a single manufacturer and/or are costly in terms of both initial costs and maintenance costs.
Accordingly, there is a need for a peripheral device monitoring and control system that can: (1) provide the ability to monitor and control the usage of the totality of the peripheral devices arranged on a widely distributed computer network by individual users, (2) be configured on existing enterprise computer systems without a large expense for additional equipment, (3) retrieve use data from peripheral devices of different types from a variety of manufacturers using only the embedded features of the peripheral devices, and (4) be easily configured and maintained.